LOST in our own daily problems here in PNG, we little realise that our very lives and future are being manipulated and controlled by developments that we have no control over.
Indeed, our own decisions and actions also impact on people living millions of kilometers away from ourselves and far removed from our socio-economic circles, such as with the global warming phenomenon. This has always been the case. Even the most enlightened invention of man has brought on many unpredictable consequences along with those that man has anticipated. Such is the way of nature.
Yet man has always thought that he is always right, even when he has been found to have been criminally negligent in hindsight.
Even today, in the age of knowledge and enlightenment, we think we have finally arrived at the truth and that is what gives me the creeps. I am afraid, we are about to suffer the consequences of some ill-begotten mischief, which we might be holding up today as “cutting edge technology” and innovations that will be revolutionary.
However revolutionary any technology might be, we must be mindful that nature is evolutionary. Whatever mankind might be creating today might evolve into something totally different and something totally unpredicted with dire consequences in the future.
Every living and non-living matter on earth is in a constant state of change, that animals relate to plants and plants to non-living matter in the great circle we call home.
Therefore, when man, who occupies the top rung of the evolutionary ladder, takes action on anything at all, its ripple effects will be felt all around the circle. Some of those effects will be predictable but as has happened so often, many of the effects will be totally unpredictable.
The industrial revolution enhanced mankind’s progress towards material possession, comfort and self contentment but along with them came pollution, increased social inequalities and eventually the attack on the ozone layer of the earth’s atmosphere.
As we hurdle into a future fraught with uncertainty, even in the age of enlightenment, I am fearful of the unknown consequences of man tampering with the structure of the natural universe.
Advances in computer technology, in microbiology and genetics and in nano-technology frighten me as much as it excites me.
The little that I read of advancements in these fields give me heart that the technology is finally in man’s hands to beat back disease, prolong his life and even literally duplicate himself. Technology has armed mankind with the knowledge to play God and create or recreate himself in his own image and likeness. Yet, I am certain that there has to be a catch somewhere, an unknown consequence that is prowling like a hungry cat ready to spring upon an unprepared mankind.
In computer programming, a virtual world has been created along with its own bugs, viruses and cures. Cyberspace expands exponentially – a human created technical universe expanding like real space and time. What happens in that technical universe can not be totally controlled; certainly not from one source.
So many different computers around the world sent messages and viruses and whatever else into that cyberspace that somewhere along the line, there is going to be a programme that is going to mutate and become self-programming. That is to say that artificial intelligence such as that that exists in the computer would become a sentient thing with the ability to programme itself. What then?
In bio-technology, mankind is toying with the smallest microbes and has recreated many more in the name of science and warfare so that today, there exists a host of man-created microbes that nature never created but which have all the attributes of their natural counterparts so that they can replicate and reproduce themselves and adapt to their environment and adjust and mutate into forms that man the creator himself might not have foreseen.
Who is to say that the HIV/AIDS virus is not a man-created virus that has gone feral?
In genetics, man is not only splicing genes and discovering the smallest building block of matter but also toying with those component parts so that the very code which carries the identities of subjects, can be adjusted.
Finally, science fiction meets with non-fiction science so that exact replicas of any living thing can be replicated outside of the normal reproductive process.
Female eggs can be fertilised with male sperm in a test tube and implanted in a surrogate womb on hire or technically, the fertilised egg can be grown into a full embryo and an infant outside a womb.
Limbs and organs can be grown through this process. But if man is unraveling the very building blocks of life, would there not be any consequences?
And now, yet another technology is creating waves – nanotechnology. This is mankind’s quest to build machinery of extremely small size on the order of some 100 nanometers or about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Although it is in its infancy, nano-techniques are already being used to make a number of items, some of which are being marketed in PNG such as the bio-disc, a circular concave glass that is said to contain properties to alter the molecular structure of objects such as food and water and which carries healing properties.
In nano-technology, artificial intelligence contained in tiny cell-size machines, which is invisible to the human eye, will be programmed to perform functions which we would call miraculous today.
There already exists, so I gather, the nanotech-produced self-cleaning window glass and wound dressing that contains antibiotic and anti-inflammatory properties.
The possibilities are endless.
If such technology contains properties that can reverse or rearrange molecular structures of other objects, what would happen in the instances when the technology fails as all technologies must from time to time? You cannot get a Philips screwdriver and set it going again, can you? And what if the molecular structure of our food and water were reconstituted so that it became something less than healthy for our bodies? How would we be able to tell that it is nano-technology that is responsible and not natural food poisoning?